Not-self is the idea that the self, in some sense, doesn’t really exist and emptiness is the idea that things don’t possess the essences that we usually attribute to them. Of course, there are a lot of different Buddhist traditions, but I’ve tried to focus on elements that are found across the great bulk of Buddhist traditions-for example, not-self and emptiness. Buddhism posits that we tend to misperceive fundamental aspects of our existence.

We have illusions about ourselves, other people, and the world. If you had to really boil down the Buddhist claim that I’m defending, it’s that the reason we suffer-and the reason we make other people suffer-is that we don’t see the world clearly. Let’s start by clarifying what you mean by both “Buddhism” and “True.” What Buddhist tradition are you writing about? We spoke with him recently about the relationship between natural selection and suffering, how evolutionary psychology supports the Buddhist idea of not-self, and how meditation can lead to everything from stress reduction to an understanding of Buddhism’s most radical philosophical concepts.

Wright is currently the visiting professor of science and religion at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan and the author of four books, including The Moral Animal and The Evolution of God. Though the Buddha predates Darwin by more than 2,000 years, Wright contends that Buddhism’s diagnosis of the human condition is fundamentally correct and that its prescription - primarily mindfulness meditation - can help us override our hard-wired tendency to crave. But what is the origin of our craving? In his recent New York Times best-selling book, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment, Robert Wright argues that the process of natural selection designed the human mind to crave - and therefore suffer - because never-ending dissatisfaction helped our ancestors get their genes into the next generation. The Buddha said that the origin of all suffering is craving - we either don’t get what we want or we get what we don’t want. Science of the Mind Is Buddhism True? An Interview with Robert Wright

Why buddhism is true